Historian of Exploration & Empire

Jan Mayen Maps

Jan Mayen is an isolated island in the northern Atlantic, lying between 70-72° North and 8-9° West, about 550 kilometers northeast of Iceland and 500 kilometers east of Greenland. It is entirely uninhabited, but it was the destination for the Austro-Hungarian contribution to the First International Polar Year (1882-1883). I discuss the history of its cartography in “Void into Meaning: Geophysics and ‘Imperial’ Cartography in the Far North, in Holt Meyer, Susanna Rau & Katharina Waldner, eds., SpatioTemporality: Practices – Concepts – Media (De Gruyter, forthcoming in 2016). Below you can find the maps I talk about: